Minibus driver reconstructs fatal collision with train

'I am usually a safe driver. I don't know what happened. I was speaking with my friend and then glanced to the side and saw myself on the railway track.'

The minibus driver involved in last week's crash, in which seven members of one family were killed after a train slammed into the vehicle, reconstructed the accident for police investigators yesterday.

A tearful Yashar Yeshurun was brought to the scene in a police car.

"I am usually a safe driver. I don't know what happened," he said. "I was speaking with my friend and then glanced to the side and saw myself on the railroad track."

"The vehicle got stuck and I simply couldn't get it to move," Yeshurun told police.

Ina Bede, who was the lookout person on duty at the railroad crossing at the time of the accident, also attended the reenactment. She burst into tears when a police car simulating the van approached the tracks. At the end of the hour-long reenactment, Yeshurun was returned to a cell at the Shikma prison where he is being held.

Police suspect that Yeshurun's minibus burst onto the tracks, despite the gate being closed, and was then completely crushed by a passenger train.

The seven victims of the crash were all members of one family: Aryeh and Rivka Bernstein and their four children - Yohanan, Haya and Moti Bernstein and Mali Gottstein, who was pregnant - along with Mali's baby son, Mordechai Aharon.

Mali's husband, David Gottstein, who survived the crash, was informed yesterday of his family members' deaths.

"He took it much better than we thought he would, with love and concern for his other family members," said Rabbi Chananya Chollak, chairman of the Ezer Mizion charity, who delivered the news to Gottstein. "He's a hero and we will pray for his recovery."